A number of readers have either suggested or explained that what the Obama camp is trying to do is have its cake and eat it too, make sounds of disapproval, such as President Bush did in 2004 with respect to the Swift Boaters, while still gaining advantage from them.
Perhaps. But that’s not what I’m seeing.
I’ve also seen suggestions that Obama must either reject Clark’s comments or vehemently restate them. But that’s nonsense. There’s nothing to be gained for the candidate to be critical of McCain in this regard. He can keep repeating his praise for McCain’s service and time as a POW, which he should do and is not in conflict in any way with anything that Clark said.
What his campaign should not be doing is lending its imprimatur to the proposition that because McCain saw combat in Vietnam and suffered as a POW that he has the judgment to be an effective president.
Late Update: As an example, TPM Reader SS writes …
Am I the only one who thinks that the Obama campaign is winning big here and that the media is being played badly? The conversation has begun – “it’s out there” as they say – does McCain’s record as a (not-very-good) fighter jock and POW more than thirty years ago in some way qualify him to be Commander-in-Chief? At the same time, Obama “rejects the statement” and “honors and respects Senator McCain’s service.” How is Obama hurt by this? How is McCain? And now we can let the bloviators compare this honest question to what was done to John Kerry. Remember how Kerry’s record was fair game because he brought it up and Bush and Rove pretended like they had nothing to do with the SBVT? Obama seems to have learned the new rules. As a friend of mine likes to say, if I were having any more fun, I’d have to be twins.
As I say above, if they’re on this, great. Experience has taught me not to take it for granted.
TPM Reader BA finds himself befuddled:
Continues to boggle my mind what a difference 4 years can make to the conservatives.
1996: Bob Dole is a war hero! Clinton is a draft dodger! WORSHIP THE WAR HERO!
2000: Forget the war! Ignore the potential Vietnam-era AWOL-ness of our candidate, and his complete lack of foreign policy knowledge! He’s got integrity!
2004: So what your candidate actually fought and was injured in the same war during which our candidate was so very much NOT AWOL! We mock his service and question the legitimacy of his injuries! Have a purple band-aid to wear at our convention!
2008: Only a certified war hero can lead this country! WORSHIP THE WAR HERO!
Emanuel and Pawlenty engage in a Lame-Off, Terry McAuliffe pronounces Bill on the Obama Bus, and Wes Clark hits McCain at his strongest point. All that and more in today’s Sunday Show Roundup Smorgasbord edition of TPMtv …
High-res version at Veracifier.com.
The Boston Globe had a great article yesterday about an outfit called BMW Direct Inc. whose business seems to be finding nonsense Republican candidates in hopeless races, raising tons of money for their hopeless campaigns and then funneling all the money back to themselves and sundry contractors and cronies. In 2006, they raised more than $700,000 for Charles Morse’s run against Barney Frank in which Morse managed to get only 145 votes in the Republican primary. 96% of that money went back into BMW Direct’s coffers and sundry affiliated contractors.
The Globe piece focused on the 2006 races. But today we looked at what BMW Direct is up to in 2008. Pretty much the same thing, it turns out.
In 2006, Deborah Honeycutt (R) ran against Rep. David Scott (D-GA) and lost by 38 points. This year she’s trying again. And as in 2006, what she lacks in votes she makes up for in extraordinarily successful fundraising. During the first quarter of 2008, Deborah Honeycutt managed to raise $500,000 — which would be a decent haul even for a real candidate. So far this cycle she’s raised $1.7 million and spent $1.5 million of it. And of that $16,695 has been spent in Georgia. The rest of course got gobbled up by BMW Direct.
It’s not clear to me from our reporting or the Globe’s whether these candidacies actually exist in any real sense (as in the person actually independently came up with the idea of running for office, however hopeless the odds) or whether BMW creates them. (If you’re interested, you can check out Honeycutt’s Wikipedia bio, which I have a sneaking suspicion may also tie back in some way to BMW Direct: “Deborah Travis Honeycutt, previously a political unknown, exploded on the congressional campaign scene during the 2006 election cycle.” … ed.note: Alas, editors at Wikipedia have already deep-sixed this sentence since this post first went up and generally pruned it of socket-puppet-like nonsense.) The company’s client list does include a handful of actual officeholders — like Van Hilleary Robin Hayes, David Vitter and Jim Ryun. But most seem more of the Honeycutt variety. In any case, whichever comes first, candidate or BMW, BMW’s approach seems to be to find these ersatz candidacies and then harvest the money of right-wing dupes around the country which can then be siphoned back to BMW, its contractors and affiliated companies.
On one level, I guess this is the kind of muck that Democrats should like since in addition to all the other fundraising challenges Republicans have this year they also have to contend with money siphoned off by BMW Direct that otherwise might have gone to buoying up actual Republican candidates. But it really is distressing that outfits like this are allowed to bamboozle people out of their money and face no consequences at all.
Late Update: TPM Readers NA and CS both note, very cleverly and aptly, that this is pretty much the plot line from The Producers.
The latest Quinnipiac poll shows Sen. Joe Lieberman (Party of One) sucking air in Connecticut:
Sen. Joseph Lieberman gets a 45 – 43 percent approval, down from 52 – 35 percent March 27 and his lowest score ever.
“Sen. Lieberman’s approval rating has dropped below 50 percent for the first time in 14 years of polling, with nearly two-thirds of Democrats giving him low marks, probably because he is campaigning for Sen. John McCain,” Dr. Schwartz said.
From June 26 – 29, Quinnipiac University surveyed 2,515 Connecticut registered voters with a margin of error of +/- 2 percentage points.
Andrew J. Bacevich: “Throughout the long primary season, even as various contenders in both parties argued endlessly about Iraq, they seemed oblivious to the more fundamental questions raised by the Bush years: whether global war makes sense as an antidote to terror, whether preventive war works, whether the costs of ‘global leadership’ are sustainable, and whether events in Asia rather than the Middle East just might determine the course of the 21st century.”
Obama will call for an expansion of government support for faith-based programs. That and the day’s other political news in the TPM Election Central Morning Roundup.
The latest tax avoidance trick to emerge from the UBS scandal: Smuggle diamonds in your tube of toothpaste.